| I’ll miss you
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| I’ll miss our walks
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| Trying to pretend we are in perfect step
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| Out of step now
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| Sick on the floor
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| Out of the room
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| Fenced in, trapped
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| I can still hear the schoolchildren play outside at their usual 10: 30
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| It always used to annoy me, as I was trying to sleep, but it doesn’t now
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| It seems alright
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| A replacement, a continuation
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| Their sound jangles around the room
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| It sounds so different from where I’ve been
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| A party, alone
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| Packed in with others, but never feeling so alone
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| People dance too close
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| She was there, I had only gone because I hoped she would be
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| I had arrived early, as the the streetlights were coming on
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| So I took a long walk around the block
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| Taking a few extra lefts and rights
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| Past the Chicken Cottage and the Costcutter
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| Then along a crescent that arced me out of my way
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| Past a group of figures huddled
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| Under the entrance to the flats
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| Shielding the flicking lighter from the wind
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| This… area is little more
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| Than a traffic island
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| A triangle around which cars and coaches stream into town up the bleak Old Kent
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| Or out into Kent and the coast
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| The same faces trudge around there for yeas
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| «Spare some change please? |
| Much as possible.»
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| «You want to buy some weed.»
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| «Do you have a spare cigarette?»
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| He always wants one
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| And that one about weed was not a question
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| There is a Samaritans office between two everely dilapidated buildings on a
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| black-bricked terrace
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| It has a thermometer painted on a 10 ft wooden board nailed to the outside
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| There is red paint up to the £0 mark, and, an ambitious 10 ft higher
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| Is written £200, 000
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| It never got any warmer there
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| The Man begging in the corner makes me take a huge detour when going towards my
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| flat
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| He looks up with a pitiful stare that makes me want to kick the misery out of
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| him
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| His dipit wee cup of unwanted coffee
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| A child’s sleeping bag
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| JJB sports
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| A crack, a release, his poor exhaust
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| He was lost
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| The Broadway
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| The Town Hall, such a grand building, all nautical reminiscences, here,
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| far from water
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| It would be quite a sight if you could get far back enough from it to take a
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| look
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| But my back is up against the black panelling of the gay sauna opposite
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| A coach thunders by, and I run past the video shop that I owe £5 to
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| Meaning go way back
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| I may be becoming one of those people you see in New Cross
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| I have a book, peeping out of one pocket, at least want to look vaguely
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| intellectual if someone I know
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| Or worse, someone who knows me walks by
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| I throw down the finish can into the pile between two walls, outside my flat
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| Look, there’s the hardware store
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| It has a large cutout of a radiant man and woman in overalls
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| The woman handing the man a tin of paint, up his ladder, beaming
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| It has faded in the sun
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| I bought creosote from there, once
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| What a night!
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| Pure ment.
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| It was messy!
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| It was out of hand! |
| It was out of space!
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| I rapped on that track once, at Bagley’s, remember it?!
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| Skibbadee handed me the mic
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| I got to shout «I'M GONNA SEND HIM TO OUTER SPACE TO FIIIND ANOTHER RACE!»
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| Absolutely fantastic, those days…
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| The pills these days are not the same, they don’t work
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| No love |